Monday 12 July 2010 02.01 EDT
First published on Monday 12 July 2010 02.01 EDT

Spain's victory last night, no matter the nature of the match itself, will come as a sunburst of vindication for those to whom the simple game of football, at its most perfectly realised, represents a form of art to which every player should aspire. After so many decades of failing to live up to their potential, the Spain players have emerged over the last World Cup cycle as apostles of a way of playing the game that emphasises touch, subtlety, anticipation and a finely tuned form of collective thinking.

They call it tiki-taka, an almost onomatopoeic term for the short passes that mount up like beats on a snare drum, laid out in constantly changing rhythms and at angles determined by the willingness of every player to support the man in possession.

This is football as it is played in Arsène Wenger's dreams, a game of patient accumulation in which the ball is coaxed towards the opposition's goal while barely touching the feet of players who are constantly in fluid motion. At all times aware of each other's changing positions, they take opponents out of the game through deftness and movement rather than muscularity.

Their critics claim that when this style – whether played by Spain, Barcelona or Arsenal – is not achieving results, its rhythms become monotonous and demonstrate the lack of alternative strategies. But now that tiki-taka has captured both the world and European titles, its exponents are entitled to turn such charges back in those critics' faces.

It is true that no one who values the game's ability to produce fascinating contrasts between teams of divergent styles would want to see this particular approach prevail to the exclusion of all others. A league made up of nothing but tiki-taka would be like watching a needlework competition, just as a league made up of long-ball football would be like watching truck racing.

But the faith in the values of technique and imagination demonstrated by the products of Barcelona's academy – about half of Spain's team throughout this tournament – should be fundamental to the education of all young players, which means that last night's result can only be a good thing if it interests more young players around the world in learning how to control and circulate the ball like Xavi and Andrés Iniesta.

Not that Spain are a team without contrasts, or with only one gear. No side containing Carles Puyol could be accused of disdain for passion or physicality. Beneath those cherub's curls is the face of a man you might not want to encounter in a darkened side street off the Rambla del Raval. He may not wear the national team's armband, but he has behaved throughout this tournament exactly as he does when captaining Barcelona, and the marvellous headed goal that eliminated Germany in the semi-final – a technical achievement on a par with any of David Villa's goals – was perhaps the key moment of the entire campaign.

History will debate how much Spain owe to Vicente del Bosque, their head coach, who took over from Luis Aragonés after the Euro 2008 campaign, where success put fresh wind in the team's sails. What is certain is that he and Marcello Lippi are now the only coaches to have won both the World and European cups.

When the first official match took place in Spain in 1890, the sides representing Huelva Recreation Club and Sevilla Football Club between them contained 20 British players, mostly employees of the Rio Tinto mining company and Seville's water works. An echo of the British influence lingers in the modern players' retention of the term "Mister" to address their managers. Now Del Bosque has become the Mister of Misters, the 28th full-time coach of Spain but the first to guide them to victory in the World Cup. The 59-year-old from Salamanca, whose jowly, unsmiling visage and rumpled wardrobe give him the look of a small-town minicab driver nearing the end of a week of night shifts, has once again proved himself an unassuming master of his craft.

No one can question his credentials as a football man. After playing 312 league matches as a defender for Real Madrid between 1970 and 1984 and winning 18 caps, he supervised Real's junior sides and took over as head coach from 1999 to 2003, winning two European Cups and two Spanish championships before Florentino Pérez, the club's president, decided he was not the right man to remain in charge of a squad overstuffed with galácticos.

That announcement, made the day after Del Bosque had led the team to their 29th title, looked irresponsible at the time and idiotic now. As well as being a victory for artistic football, Spain's first World Cup is also one for managers who are not interested in seeing their images blown up into posters promoting credit cards or mobile phones, and who are happy to stand back and let a group of gifted players take the credit, as Del Bosque did last night.